Golden Books Have Been Bedtime Story Companions For 43 Years, But Some Critics Still Insist They're Merely The Junk F O O D O F K I D S Literature

May 20, 1985|by JOE KITA, The Morning Call

Sixty-nine cent storybooks may seem like a cheap way to a child's heart, but for the last 43 years parents have been using Little Golden Books for just that.

Most often, they arrive with the groceries. Tucked between the Cheez Doodles and Hi-C, they play colorful peek-a-boo with wide-eyed, giggling toddlers. Out of those paper sacks peep "The Poky Little Puppy," "Scuffy the Tugboat" and "The Saggy Baggy Elephant" - ageless characters living within small, square picturebooks decorated with gold bindings. In much the same way we might have embraced them decades ago, each awaits adoption by a new heart.

While they've endured since 1942 and sold approximately 58 million copies just last year, Little Golden Books are considered by some to be the National Enquirer of children's literature. Despite their widespread popularity, you won't find them in bookstores nor are they reviewed by the New York Times.

Rather, they inhabit the checkout lanes of supermarkets and department stores with a few to be found even at highway rest stops. They are cheap, blatantly commercial, occasionally outdated and dismissed as worthless by a number of librarians. Still, almost in spite of themselves, they succeed. In fact, an estimated 2 billion to 3 billion items have been sold over the years bearing the "Golden" name.

What we have then is a puzzling paradox, a product which has very nearly become an American institution, yet one which is classified as a Big Mac by certain literary chefs. Cast aside the sentimentality, they say, and you're left with a rather bland selection of reading material.

"They did their best publishing 35-40 years ago," said the children's book editor of the New York Times, Eden Lipson. "Back then, with Poky and Scuffy, they were on the cutting edge of picturebook development. These are prize titles to treasure and enjoy, but they've abused that list. They've been sold and re-sold, re-worked and diluted while the children's book industry has moved forward in very interesting ways . .

"We do not feel we're a lower class of children's book," countered Lisa Ray Johnson, the public relations manager for Western Publishing, Inc., the distributors of Little Golden Books. "They are a good value books they'll want to read again and again. We're not striving to educate the world to the classics of literature. These are books that entertain."

Once upon a time, picturebooks were Christmas wishes that often went unfulfilled. They were beyond the budgets of most families and, if purchased, were certainly not meant to be soiled by spilled milk.

Prior to the 1930s, most publishers did not consider children a serious market. Typical juvenile titles like "Bambi," for instance, which was first published in 1928, contained few illustrations and relied upon their text for appeal. Such publications were designed primarily for adults and marketed in big city bookstores and downtown libraries but not in the corner grocery store haunts of the average American youngster.

Then, in the late 1930s, a Western affiliated group known as the Artists and Writers Guild began to translate some of the most popular foreign picturebooks into English and to reissue them at affordable prices. In 1942, their efforts at bringing quality children's literature to the masses culminated in the creation of Little Golden Books. Published by Simon & Schuster and printed by Western, the original 12 titles sold for just 25 cents each and were distributed at 800 retail outlets, including Macy's, Gimbel's and Marshall Field's.

Although critics believed such a mass market experiment was doomed to failure, with some going as far as to say "they could ruin the sales of more expensive books with higher markups," the Little Golden Books met with unparalleled success. Within five months, they had gone through three editions totaling 1.5 million copies, and only World War II paper rationing prevented them from being even more of a sensation.

Barbara Bader, in her history of "American Picturebooks from Noah's Ark to The Beast Within," gives a number of reasons for the overnight success of the Little Golden Books. Besides being cheap, readily available and aimed at a previously ignored segment of the population (ages 3 to 7), they arrived during an era when parents were becoming increasingly aware of the value of reading to the very young and at a time when wartime austerity was causing conventional toys to disappear. What's more, they utilized the latest color printing techniques to produce an eye-catching product well-suited for impulse buying.